Thermal tolerance trade-offs associated with the right arm of chromosome 3 and marked by the hsr-omega gene in Drosophila melanogaster

Drosophila melanogaster occurs in diverse climatic regions and shows opposing clinal changes in resistance to heat and resistance to cold along a 3000 km latitudinal transect on the eastern coast of Australia. We report here on variation at a polymorphic 8 bp-indel site in the heat shock hsr-omega gene that maps to the right arm of chromosome 3. The frequency of the genetic element marked by the L form of the gene was strongly and positively associated with latitude along this transect, and latitudinal differences in L frequency were robustly associated with latitudinal differences in maximum temperature for the hottest month. On a genetic background mixed for genes from each end of the cline a set of 10 lines was derived, five of which were fixed for the L marker, the absence of ln(3R)P and 12 kb of repeats at a second polymorphic site at the 3' end of hsr-omega, and five that were fixed for the S marker, ln(3R)P and 15 kb of hsr-omega repeats. For two different measures of heat tolerance S lines outperformed L lines, and for two different measures of cold tolerance L lines outperformed S lines. These data suggest that an element on the right arm of chromosome 3, possibly ln(3R)P, confers heat resistance but carries the trade-off of also conferring susceptibility to cold. This element occurs at high frequency near the equator. The alternate element on the other hand, at high frequency at temperate latitudes, confers cold resistance at the cost of heat susceptibility.